Today, as part of her nationwide listening tour, Secretary
Penny Pritzker toured Loud Recording Studios with Cary Sherman, Chairman and
CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and Jim Catino,
Vice President of A&R for Sony Music Nashville. The music industry is a
vibrant part of Nashville’s economy and the American economy as a whole. In
fact, entertainment, literary and artistic originals contributed $74 billion to
the U.S. economy last year, according to the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of
Economic Analysis.

According to a report by the Nashville Area Chamber of
Commerce and the Music City Music Council, the music industry sustains more
than 56,000 jobs and contributes both to the local economy and the region’s
gross domestic product.

During the roundtable, Secretary Pritzker not only discussed
how the music and entertainment industries are contributing to the health of
the creative economy, but also the key role the Commerce Department plays in
supporting and protecting intellectual property and innovation.

Recently, the Commerce Department’s U.S. Patent and
Trademark Office released the green
paper on Copyright Policy, Creativity, and Innovation in the Digital Economy.
The green paper calls for multi-stakeholder dialogues and roundtables on
pressing policy debates including the status of remixes, the reselling of
digital copyrighted works, prosecution of individual file-sharers, and the role
of government in the online licensing marketplace. The Secretary expressed that
the green paper represents Commerce’s ongoing effort to balance intellectual
property rights and the need to nurture the free and open Internet as an
economic engine and platform for innovation.

Recently Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) revised
the way it counts the amount of money businesses invest in the production of such intellectual property as part of gross domestic product (GDP). BEA on July 31 began including the amount of money businesses invest in
the production of intellectual property as part of gross domestic product, or
GDP. That means money that a recording studio invests in the creation of a new
song will be counted in GDP. It’s the same treatment as when a company
buys a drill press or invests in a new building. The new expenditures for entertainment, literary, and artistic originals are grouped with expenditures for software into a new
investment category called “intellectual property products.”

The music industry is a vibrant part of not just Nashville’s
economy, but the nation’s as well. In short, creative Americans create jobs. As Secretary Pritzker continues to travel the country, she will continue to look for ways the federal government can work with this industry to create even more opportunities and even more jobs.